22 out of 25 people found the following review useful:Reconceptualizes what cinema can do, 4 April 2008

Családi tüzfészek (aka Family Nest) is an intimate portrayal of a
family slowly disintegrating under various pressures in late 1970s
communist Hungary. The plot of the film is deceptively simple, with the
occasional momentous event--including one that's relatively shocking,
but plot in a conventional sense is not the focus here.

What makes Family Nest so masterful is director writer/director Béla
Tarr's skill at suggesting layers of emotion, commentary and meaning
through cinematography and staging. For example, early in the film
there is an extended scene of the family that is the film's focus
eating dinner in their crowded apartment with some friends. Tarr has
the camera crammed in a small room with the cast, necessitating that
almost the entire scene is shot in close-ups. There are numerous
conversations and an increasing amount of bickering occurring
simultaneously. The viewer cannot escape a sense of claustrophobia and
chaos. Later in the scene, Tarr trains his camera on the family's
television, which is showing a news story about communism. There is
irony between the ideological foundations necessary for communism and
what we see occurring among just this one small group.

As the film progresses, Tarr treats us to many more ironies and
juxtapositions, such as the overbearing father's distorted view of his
sons versus their "true nature", a carnival versus addiction and
sickness, and the futility of government housing policy versus the
practical requirements for keeping a husband and wife together.

Some scenes--and especially the final two shots, last far longer than
many viewers will be accustomed to, but through such unusual
techniques, Tarr manages to "dig in" to emotional and dramatic spaces
that could not otherwise be reached. Like much of his work, it suggests
a reconceptualization of what cinema can do and how it can do it.

1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:Cidade de Spice Girl Power, 4 April 2008

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

A rising feminist movement is a major theme of this Brazilian film
about a hip-hop Spice Girls-style singing act trying to make it in the
midst of the socio-economic problems of lower class Sao Paolo. That
surprised me a bit, because I wouldn't have guessed that feminism was a
new idea at this point in industrialized Brazil, but I guess I just do
not know that much about Brazil.

At times, Antônia - O Filme seems like a spin-off, in a manner more
typical of sitcom spinoffs minus the humor, of Cidade de Deus. It
occurs in the same world, with the same kinds of problems, only this
time from a young woman's perspective. The "spin-off" flavor is maybe
explainable by the fact that some of Cidade de Deus' production team is
behind Antônia - O Filme, too, and looking at the IMDb, I see that
apparently there's a television show, "Antônia", based on these same
characters and using these same actors.

Friendship is also a major theme, following these Brazilian Spice
Girls--named The Antônias in the film--through serious roadblocks to
philia as one by one, other things intrude on their lives and they have
to quit the band.

From what I can discern, at least some of the Antônias have musical
careers in real life, and they're certainly good singers. With the
exception of an impromptu version of "Killing Me Softly with His Song",
the music they perform in the film is somewhat vacuous to my tastes,
and those scenes made me feel more like I was watching a film such as
Stomp the Yard, but the grittier Cidade de Deus-flavored scenes were
dominant and worthwhile if not completely novel.

2 out of 4 people found the following review useful:Good, but far from perfect, 21 January 2008

First, let me say that I like this game--enough that I'll definitely
buy a sequel to it, and I won't need to rent it to try it out first.

However, I'm a sucker for racing games. After Grand Theft Auto-type,
large-world, free roam and mission games, racing games are definitely
my favorite--I can't remember one I didn't enjoy. But if you're not as
enamored with racing games, there are a number of flaws to note with
Motorstorm:

* There are only seven tracks. You're going to play them over and over
and over. There can be different paths to take within a track, and in
theory, the different vehicles you have to use--as different as dirt
bikes and big rigs--necessitate taking different paths, but in
practice, you'll probably find that mastering a particular path on a
particular track will allow you to win regardless of your vehicle, so
at about the halfway point, gameplay becomes more "mechanical" as you
keep going through the motions.

* To deal with the above problem and make the game a bit more
challenging, three tactics are used, with all of them being less than
satisfactory to annoying:

- The weather and time of day is varied. This is actually a nice
feature; the problem is that it just isn't done enough.

- A regular feature of the game is that dust and mud appear on the
"camera". For some races, they're harder because so much mud splashes
on your camera that you're effectively blindfolded for a few moments.

- The AI racers become extremely annoying. They're designed just to
make the game harder as it goes along. If you imagine their actions
being real world behavior, it's more like you're racing against a cadre
of institutionalized mental patients:

The AI will usually perform the same relative to you for each race.
If you drive like a grandpa through a couple laps, it will too, and
then as you drive like a bat out of hell, using boost all the time for
the last lap, it will too.

You're going to wreck--and explode--your vehicle a lot. For most of
the race, it's easy to regain your position. But on the last stretch of
the last lap, that doesn't matter, and guess what? (See the following.)

No matter how well you're doing or how far ahead you think you are,
on most races, AI racers will come out of nowhere on the last stretch
of the last lap, overtaking you and/or wrecking you so you can't
progress. You have to come in first on most races to keep unlocking
more.

Motorstorm often seems more like smash-em-up derby than a race. AI
cars can constantly explode all around you, but regardless of how much
they do this, even if you drive through the track fast and clean, AI
racers will be on your butt in certain sections, especially on the last
stretch of the last lap.

With the AI so focused on smash-em-up derby, higher levels are
primarily harder because the AI tries to knock your vehicle into rocks,
off of cliffs, etc. It will do this as if its the AI "driver's" sole
purpose--as if it couldn't care less if other vehicles are blowing
past, and even if you almost come to a complete stop, the AI will match
your speed just to knock you into a wall.

* The music becomes repetitive. Of course, with the amount of hours
you'll put in to complete this game, that's probably inevitable, even
with twenty-one songs, but at times, it seems like the same five songs
keep playing over and over. On a game like this, we should be able to
load our own music to listen to--shouldn't that be easy on the PS3?

* The load times can be agonizing. Like some others, this is the first
game I've played on my PS3. When the first track for the first race was
loading, I was worried that my PS3 crashed already. It didn't. That's
just how the races load.

* There is no offline multiplayer mode. I don't care much about that
feature, but many do. Multiplayer is online only.

So, are there no positives beyond this being a racing game? Of course
there are:

* The graphics are beautiful. I don't know if this is going to be
unusual for PS3 games, but in comparison, it has actually made normal
DVDs on my big-screen HD television look less than stellar to me. If
part of the goal was to get consumers to check out BluRay DVDs, the PS3
is doing its job.

* Even though there aren't enough tracks or enough variation on those
tracks, those routes are extremely well done. They're a heck of a lot
of fun to race on.

* The range of vehicles is great. There are a lot of choices, they look
good, and they handle well, with some nice realistic touches.

* The smash-em-up derby approach can actually be fun. The graphics for
the wrecks and explosions are fantastic--you'll find yourself wrecking
just to watch it. BUT, one of two things should have been done to make
this better: either have a smash-em-up derby contest that's a different
mode--NOT a race, and/or award points during the races for wrecking
other cars than your own. For example, if you cause five other cars to
wreck during a race, you get a position bonus (if you need it) at the
end, so that if you came in second during the race but caused five
wrecks, you get boosted up to first instead (of course, this should
apply to all racers), or if you came in third but caused ten wrecks,
you get boosted to first, etc. Each time you get wrecked instead would
subtract the bonus points from one of the wrecks you caused.

2 out of 6 people found the following review useful:Boyle in the Sun, 19 January 2008

The more Danny Boyle films I see, the more he moves up my "worst
directors" list. I didn't think Trainspotting was anything spectacular,
I hated 28 Days Later, and I hated Sunshine. Of course, three films out
of eight (not including his television work) isn't enough to put him at
the top of the worst directors list, but it's enough to make me dread
seeing any more of his films.

Sunshine seems like a low budget independent film. Most of it looks
bad--the cinematography, most of the special effects, the stuff that
we're supposed to think is in space and not models. The performances
tend to come across as slightly above amateur. The dialogue is often
ridiculous, insular and jargony. Boyle directs his cast (or lets them,
at least) to act pretentiously serious and melodramatic. All of the
above are actually problems with all of the Boyle films I've seen to
date.

But the biggest problem is that Boyle simply does not know how to tell
a story here. Too much is unexplained. Too much is just skipped. Too
much is like a bad acid trip (with an emphasis on bad).

As sci-fi, Sunshine doesn't have much to do with real-world science.
Now, as fiction, I don't think that it has to have much to do with
real-world science. But if it's going to have fictional world science,
it needs to give us some grounding on what the "rules" of the fictional
world are. Otherwise we're just in the dark, and events are more or
less random. Of course, you could take Sunshine as more of an
impressionistic work commenting on things like science vs. religion or
commenting on man's obsession with everything from sun worship to
authority, control, collecting/hording, ideologies, etc., but the
problem is that it's not very satisfactory on those more abstract
levels, either, and it's also too loaded down with techie jargon and
plot developments to work on that level.

1 out of 5 people found the following review useful:What the hell?, 18 December 2007

Wow, this is a bad film. I think this may be the first flick with some
passable production values (you can hear dialogue, they know how to do
lighting, etc.) that I've scored a 1. Others have mentioned many of the
problems, but some bear repeating as a forewarning:

* Every character seems to be in a separate story/different film. Maybe
this was an experimental work wherein each actor was told to write
their own Mummy story/script and act out (in whatever style of their
choosing, no matter how incongruous) their self-penned part while
others did the same.

* Despite the multitude of actor/writers, the film primarily works as a
sleep aid. Not much happens. I was starting to wonder if this wasn't
really a low-budget 1970s BBC attempt to make a "relatively" boring
drama.

*Actors are sometimes attacked by nothing. Maybe they were told that
effects shots would be added later. That didn't happen. So most of
these scenes are amusingly ridiculous.

* The various scenes of the simultaneous separate stories seem to be
edited by throwing a hundred randomly selected pieces of film in the
air and putting them together however they landed.

* It's not clear how many mummies are supposed to be involved in the
story. There seem to be a few different ones . . . you never get to see
most of them very well though. It's a mystery who most of them are,
where they came from, and what they're trying to do.

* Because there are twenty different sketchy stories occurring at the
same time, the film makes less and less sense as it progresses. Like
another viewer, I got to a point where I started looking for more
interesting things to do--like brushing my teeth--without caring if I
hit pause or not . . . the movie wasn't going to make sense no matter
what I did. There's a strong "everything including the kitchen sink"
approach evident. I primarily entertained myself from the halfway mark
by making fun of the film and writing/reciting my own dialogue,
MST3K-style. For example, when they decide they all need to go
downstairs for some ceremony, I'd add, "Now, we all need to do the
hokey pokey." It made just as much sense as the actual dialogue.

1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:Can be worthwhile if you know what to expect and know your tastes, 2 December 2007

Captivity is strongly in the tradition of films like the Cube series,
the Saw series and the Hostel series--so subtract at least one point if
you care about "originality". It also strains
plausibility/believability almost to the point of occasionally seeming
very close to a spoof of those kinds of films, so you need to subtract
at least one more point if you care about actual world verisimilitude.
And of course, the comparisons should suggest that this is a torture
film. It can get pretty graphic and brutal at that, so that will have
some bearing on whether you enjoy Captivity or not.

I normally don't care about originality so much, but Captivity received
a slight reduction from me on that end because it fairly transparently
seems like a "cash in on the trend" film. Derivativeness when it is
sincere inspiration, unwitting influence or sheer coincidence are fine
with me. But here, it seems more like the producers said, "Hey, these
films are hot right now; what can we do in the same vein, but a bit
different, and that's also more extreme in some ways so we get kids
talking about it like the latest thrill ride?" Of course, I could be
wrong about those intentions, but I have to go by what it seems like to
me.

I also normally don't care about plausibility so much, but I found
myself somewhat lamenting that they didn't just go ahead and make the
absurdist spoof film instead, as they're so often closer than a cigar.
Surely the time is ripe for a spoof of the genre.

On the other hand, for what it is, Captivity does its job fairly well.
Elisha Cuthbert is certainly pleasant to look at, which is smart,
because she's on screen about 90 percent of the time. And although the
ending may be a bit predictable once you get close to it--a door must
be left open for sequels just in case the box office receipts are good,
it also offers enough pleasantly twisted possibilities that I'm hoping
a (probably low budget, direct-to-video) sequel is made despite the
paltry financial showing Captivity actually had. So, as long as you do
not expect an unprecedented work of genius, you like this genre, and
you have a healthy taste for cheese and tackiness, Captivity is worth
watching.

1 out of 3 people found the following review useful:Slightly uneven but very enjoyable, 16 November 2007

It may take some adjusting to be able to appreciate this version of
Wind in the Willows. Although now distributed by Disney on home video,
the quick pacing and wild abandon of Disney's 1949 version, which was
half of the film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, is not to be
found here. Neither will you find the over-the-top absurdism of "Monty
Python's Flying Circus" (1969), despite the presence of four Pythoners,
including The Wind in the Willows' screenwriter, director and star,
Terry Jones.

On the other hand, wild abandon and Pythonesque absurdism are not
completely absent, but this is usually a much more mild, subtle and
deliberately-paced affair which more closely follows Kenneth Grahame's
original book--except for the plot developments towards the end. Jones
has made sure to retain much of the book's symbolism of ideas and
phenomena such as class stratification, plus he adds some of his own
with more fascistic weasels. But at the same time, he also manages to
produce something family and kid-friendly.

Although filled with humor, The Wind in the Willows is rarely--and
rarely tries to be--laugh-out-loud funny, even though it occasionally
reaches the comedic heights of Python (for example, during the
courtroom scene, which features a great cameo from John Cleese). But
most of the Python crew have spent the majority of their careers in an
attempt to avoid being pigeonholed in that particular style--while most
Python fans have experienced years of at least slight frustration at
the subsequent void. Jones strikes a nice balance here, and ends up
producing a very enjoyable, slightly fantastic, slightly silly romp
with its own dramatic sensibilities.

6 out of 7 people found the following review useful:The (Cute) CliffsNotes Version, 16 November 2007

Too many people will probably dismiss this as a cheap knock-off, a
quick cash-in. Heck, the production company is "American Film
Investment Corporation", which only supports those notions. Who is
going to say, "Hey, American Film Investment Corporation, I bet this is
some great art"? AFIC was also known as "Golden Films", but the credits
here announce AFIC in bold letters instead.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss this so easily. Because although
this version of Wizard of Oz isn't some overlooked masterpiece, it's
very well done for a budget, abbreviated, animated version of the
story, which should provide enjoyment for huge fans of either The
Wizard of Oz or animation in general.

The animation style is closest to traditional American Saturday morning
cartoon fare. That might turn some people off, but it's the style of
programs like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969), The Jetsons (1962) and
The Flintstones (1960), and I absolutely love all of those (especially
Scooby-Doo), partially because of the animation, even though that style
was determined more because of budget restrictions than for any
artistic reason.

A great job was done in finding voice actors who closely resemble the
actors from the famous 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. It may seem
initially odd that this decision was made, but it wasn't a bad idea, as
this AFIC version is obviously akin to a CliffsNotes rendition of the
1939 film--although it has some significant commonalities with the
original book that will please purists.

While no one should substitute this for the 1939 film (and I don't
think it's a good idea to do that with kids, either), I found myself
far more enamored with it than I expected--you might too if you're not
too much of a sourpuss.

2 out of 4 people found the following review useful:Beautifully crazed, frantic and surreal with a good message, 16 November 2007

I've mentioned this many times, but first it's important to remember
that I'm biased. I don't think there's an animated Disney film that
I've given less than a 10 out of 10. Heck, I give a large percentage of
their live action fare a 10 out of 10, and almost never give any of
their films lower than a 7 out of 10. I don't do this just because
they're Disney and I'm issuing a vote to keep me in an extended,
fantastical childhood (I need no assistance in maintaining an element
of that, thank you); I do it because I really enjoy their work that
much.

It's easy to see how many people might not care for Meet the Robinsons.
It has far more in common stylistically with recent Disney films like
Chicken Little (2005) and Lilo & Stitch (2002) than it does with the
"classic" Disney films (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937),
Cinderella (1950), etc.), or even their "second golden age" (The Lion
King (1994), Beauty and the Beast (1991), etc.)--although it's
worthwhile to note that some characteristics are not that far removed
from Alice in Wonderland (1951) or even Pinocchio (1940), and you'll
find things reminiscent of many other films--from Toy Story (1995) to
Robots (2005) to Looney Tunes cartoons. It has an unusual, surrealistic
flow, and it often seems like there's nowhere the animators won't go
for a bit of weirdness.

But especially this latter fact is part of the charm to me. Meet the
Robinsons may be adapted from the gorgeously drawn children's book,
William Joyce's A Day with Wilbur Robinson (1993), but it seems just as
inspired by Edward Lear's "Nonsense" books, which were some of my first
favorites as a kid.

Visually, Meet the Robinsons is just as beautiful as Joyce's work. And
beneath all the wonderfully frantic surrealism, which is loaded with
quick, funny pop culture references, there's a great message here about
creativity, experimentation, mindful experience and the necessity and
acceptance of failure and rejection.

2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:Children of the Condo, 13 November 2007

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Children of the Corn (CotC) scripts may have never been literary
masterpieces, but for some reason, CotC 6 and 7 have scripts that seem
like very early drafts--or even as if they were only partially complete
and the directors decided to just wing it for the rest of the film.
It's a shame because both films otherwise had the potential to be quite
good.

For CotC7, a relatively oblique path was chosen (probably to the
chagrin of those predisposed to purism)--it's more or less a "haunted
house" film. This was promising to me, as by the time you get around to
the seventh entry in a series, a change of pace is refreshing, and
haunted house (really, haunted anything) films are probably my favorite
horror subgenre.

For the first 45 minutes or so, CotC7 was satisfying to me. In fact,
for the first 10 or 15 minutes, it seemed reminiscent of the more
recent 1408 (2007), which I loved. It had a good setting, a good
premise, good atmosphere, creepy scenes, a bit of eye candy, and even a
bit of odd humor.

But right about the halfway mark, it starts to unravel. Mysterious
characters (many supernatural) are never explained, and they keep
growing in number. A couple scenes featured supernatural characters
that don't cohere with the rest of the film--for example, one has a
zombie or adult burn victim. The film starts getting choppy, and it
begins to feel more like a series of pointless and disconnected "scary"
set-pieces.

Worse, there was a stable of interesting human characters who were
never explored enough--we're just teased with them and then they're
usually quickly dispatched with relatively generic horror film deaths.
And the crux of the story--Jamie's (Claudette Mink) missing
grandmother--remains murky through the end. The biggest tragedy is that
the ball was dropped. With just a bit more work on the script--another
two or three drafts, maybe--this could have been one of the better
entries of this uneven series.